I just read an interesting 2002 profile of US-based hedge fund Galleon Group and its Sri Lankan-born founder, Raj Rajaratnam, in the Financial Times. (Galleon has begun to invest in India with a pre-IPO investment in BPO firm FirstSource and a reported investment in financial services firm Edelweiss Capital.)
Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of information and networking services to the private equity and venture capital ecosystem in India. View free samples of Venture Intelligence newsletters and reports.
In the US hedge fund industry Raj is well known since he manages a US $ 5 billion plus Hedge fund called Galleon Group. Raj was also featured in an interesting book published last year under the title "The new investment superstars" - 13 great investors and their strategies for superior returns. The 13 managers featured were selected on the basis of a few basic criteria. Each manages atleast US $ 1 billion in assets and each has matched or outperformed the Standard and Poor for at least seven years.
Though the book hadn't, the Daily Mirror compared the individual performance of the 13 fund managers featured and Raj indeed comes on top on the basis of net performance (%) or compounded average annual return of the fund/manager concerned thereby proving his skills of fund management.
... Rajaratnam covers companies as well. He is the managing general partner and portfolio manager of the Galleon Technology and New Media funds. He describes himself as the quarterback of the team. He is involved with everything in the firm and often accompanies the analysts to their company meetings. Rajaratnam meets with two to three companies a day. One week out of every month, he visits about 25 companies in California.
Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of information and networking services to the private equity and venture capital ecosystem in India. View free samples of Venture Intelligence newsletters and reports.